36 Responses to “Embryogenesis of Breath”

Hi, just had my first visit and must return for a longer cruise before I respond with any insight –but I thought I’d congratulate you on getting it up and running. Looks spiffy. Nice colour. Astute design. Interesting topic, compelling language.
Look forward to more time with it.

Your site takes my breath away/is breathtaking, particularly sensitive as I am just now (you know why).
I think you achieve your objective so very well… science and emotion meet, so evocative is the process of discovery, so emotional the attempt to simulate (risking failure).

I’ve taken a bit more time with your site and find it, the second time around, both more and less successful (uh oh, the blush is off the rose:). If I may, I’ll just babble on here a bit to give you a feel for my approach.
The site is really well-organized and clear, which is a pleasure in itself. I noticed this time that there are two sides to each section, oppositional, like science and emotion, but also not really opposed to each other, more paired like two lungs.

The model fetus pic really did it to me, first AND second time around. The fact that it is colourless (white) and seen in a white field, outside the womb, the baby on its head makes for a powerful image: tragic/comic/melancholic, I’m not sure how to describe it.

Maybe its a stretch but it reminds me of some of my own work, plaster casts made by cupping plaster with the hands or in places around the body, a sample is the old version of my site, at http://www.interlog.com/~driftr/casts.html. Also some pottery I saw in a mag last year sometime, by a woman in England, white porcelain bowl forms that are so organic you would swear they are . I’ll have to look this up again.

Obviously the art is in the project overall rather than in individual images or models? But then I had some difficulty interpretting the layered images. They are interesting but I find them very difficult to read in an aesthetic way, they are so literally the result of a rational process.

For me, the text does not consistently tread the line between science and pleasure, not like the images do:

There are places where I lost the rational sense of the sentence momentarily in favour of a more poetic interpretation:

>breathing chambers over the pattern of surface ice< In other places the scientific description struck me very emotionally, like found objects sometimes do:
>the bronchial passages must carry air to the furthest tips of the breathing chambers of the lung… That is the function of the breath.< The last panel/page surprised me a bit, not sure why the fetish should be dangerous, a very rationalist point of view isn't it? Of course magic thinking does not cure disease, but doesn't do a whole host of things that science for the most part ignors?
hypomnemata – living text

Thx for the links: Your “Drift” site and your
use of moulage casting, I think, are very
appropriate responses to what I am trying to do on
this site.Your lateral drifting approach
complements our (Leonhardt and myself)
hierarchical structure. I breath a sigh of relief
when on “Drift”. “Hypomnemata” adds a whole
library of ancillery texts, especially Foucault’s
dscription of the hypomnemata personal collection
style notebook, and its contrast with the
confesasional notebooks of the Romantic
philosophers and artists.

Why do you find the art of this site to be in
the overall piece rather than in the individual
images? My fears are exactly the opposite: that
the web site is too documentational and book-like
in its format; in short, too much like scientific
illustration and not enough like visual art.
Whereas, the individual images vary both in their
roles in the building of the embryological/theory
project and in their relation to artmaking. To my
mind there is a big difference between the
sections “Is Like”, “Is Not Like” etc., which I
think use art processes (pattern construction/
recognition – visual metaphors) and the modelling
sections constructed as scientific illustration,
ie., the interplay of images and texts which
represent content beyond both mediums. I really
appreciate your tackling this issue as it is
deeply interesting to me and few will engage the
site so intensely and respectfully as you are. I
should mention that I have continued to work with
the overlay images in large scale woodcut/digital
collages.

A bit of background about the white “embryo
pic” you mention above. This photograph is from a
suite of pictures of three plasticene models I
built to represent genital differentiation. After
20 years of work on this subject it occured to me
that every image I had seen of embryonic genital
development, whether in scientific text books or
popular magazines, represented the genitals as if
the embryo is lying on its back like an adult
patient on an examination table (or in stirrups).
The unacknowledged associations with adult
pornography and subjugation/disempowerment infect
(it sems to me) virtually the whole history of
imaging human genital development. I set out to
build models of genital development which, a)
include the relationship between the gnitals and
the whole body of the embryo and b) position the
genitals in the photographic image more as they
would be seen pictured in the womb – embryo
floating head down, etc. This technique has, as
you note, introduced a whole new set of
difficulties. But the tragi-comic look of these
images does make it clear how important it is to
render explicit the conventions for understanding
any model.

This is also my answer to your question about
the dangers of turning a representation – which
medels content beyond itself, into a fetish – a
model that we mistakenly identify with the content
it represents. Fetishes have there place, of
course, especially in art. But not, I think , in
the representation of theories of human
embryological development.

Jack, I am amazed how our readings of your site can be so opposite. I find the overall effect of the site conceptually challenging, not merely descriptive but imaginative, creative. The idea of liminal skin for example is not something one would normally encounter in a scientific, or is that scientistic?, site. Niether would a scientist, at least the kind that I think of when I say the word scientist, normally be concerned about pleasure in the experience of “data”.
At the same time, I do get what you are saying because the site is very clearly descriptive in the way it is organized; leaps of faith, suspension of disbelief, are called for by the content.

Your development of the fetus model in its proper perspective is very interesting. I didn’t get this critical “angle” at all, unless subconsciously – could you say something about this in the site itself? (I suppose here in the dialogue section is IN the site really).

Perhaps any kind of representation necessarily is limited, and carries therefore political baggage. It is good to become aware of that baggage – examining how representations claim the truth and disclosing the truth that is so claimed.

With a new baby at home I am constantly looking at what he is looking at with such fascination, wondering what he sees. So much of what he sees is from a completely unusual perspective, from the floor, up into bright lights, giant heads poking in at him, faces sideways and upside down. Nothing seems to disorient him but I am often on the edge of uncertainty – lifting and carrying a being who is so not bound into the normal horizontal/vertical grid of things.

The image as a fetish – enshrining a spirit – is
appropriate as art when you reflect on Jung’s
universal sysmbols. You must accept that there is
Spirit-That-Is-In-All-Things and that Spirit is
Love, and is represented as beauty when viewed in
a social-restricted mind set or in a form of
meditation or intuition or instinct. Asthetics of
icons is only enhanced when the Inner-Self is
connected with the icon. Therefore patterens in
Nature that are represented by icons, reveal
themselves as beauty to a viewer who is able to
sense the connection of All Things. A fetish is
art because it contains the spirit of what it
represents and shines forth as beauty.

Response to Jerry Jordison
Jerry, Wonderful to find your response on this
site. A “RavenStar Energy Centre”, references to
Jung – your response takes me back with a jolt to
the arctic in 1969-70 when you were working for
the DOT weather station in Baker Lake and Sheila
and I were working with Inuit artists at the
Sanavik Co-op. I recall our often year-long
converstaions (arctic time?) about what I believe
to be the seamless integration of art into
Angosaglo’s and Oonark’s practical life. As you
can see from this site, the question of the role
of visual art in picturing knowledge remains at
the centre of my project. Great to hear from you.
Love to Pat, Kevin and Scott.

This is fun: I’m sorry that I waited so long to
respond! I have a few questions and I would love
to hear feedback on them – or better yet – get some
answers. Here goes:

1. Do pictures add content or information that
could not be added with text alone?

2. Some biologists might argue that pictures
simplify concepts. Why should this be so? If new
content, new associations, or new conceptual ties
are made as a result of the images used, then it
would seem that a lot more than simplification is
going on.

3. Is the relation between illustration and
metaphor one of identity?

4. What are the risks, if any, of identifying
images with what they represent?

That’s all the questions I have for now. I’ll
finish by saying that this is a beautiful and
thought-provoking work and I’m glad to have the
opportunity to discuss it!

Let our exchange be a conversation – partial
answers, incomplete thoughts, suggestions – even
though your questions could easily inspire a
doctoral thesis.
1.and 2. Do pictures add content or
informatiuon … ? and do pictures simplify
content … ?
“The words or the language, as they are
written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in
my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities
which serve as elements in thought are certain
signs and more or less clear images which can be
‘voluntarily’ reproduced or combined … The above
mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and
some of muscular type. Conventional words or other
signs have to be sought for laborously only in a
secondary stage.” Einstein in Baigrie (1996), p.41
We seem to believe in a hierarchy which places
material pictures and ” certain signs and more or
less clear images …” at the bottom, progressing
upwards through degrees of increasing abstraction
until the order of mathematical logic symbolically
expressed in words is reached. It is at the level
of words that we believe thought occurs.
If Einstein (above) is to be taken at face
value, then the Western prejudice which collapses
thought into language would seem to exclude
Einstein’s psychical images from the class of
“thoughts”.
My own premise is that thought (whether in
science or in art) is constituted of all forms of
symbolic discourse, private/introspective as well
as public/communicative, material mediums such as
“psychical” entities and physical abjects as well
as abstract systems. And thought, ie., pictures
and words and the spaces in between these, I
believe, is mediated by convention.
In direct response to tour question Moira, I
think some concepts can best be expressed in
pictures and, therefore, require translation (with
a loss of content) into words. And the opposite is
true for word centered concepts.
3. Does “illustration” equal “metaphor”? This
web site started as an attempt to analyze my own
uses of art to enact a scientific theory of
embryogenesis. In response to your question Moira
I find I must attempt a meta or second order
analysis of the site itself. Here we go.
The term ‘illustration’ to my mind implies a
specific relation between the processes of
theorizing about science and the processes of
picturing the science/theory – a relation (I
contend) where, in the case of this web site, my
concept or theory of fetal lung development is
communicated in a dialogue between digital
pictures of models and textual description. Both
pictures and words in this case are about
something else: they jointly represent a theory of
fetal lung development. ‘Illustration’ is how I
think of the pictures and texts in the section of
the site titled “Beware of Models”.
Metaphor: in the earlier branches of the site,
such as “Is Like”, I am using what I think of as
art processes – visual pattern recognition
(construction?) which, as “Is Like” suggests, is a
process of identifying visual metaphors, as a
method for enacting embryological science – using
picturing to do science.
4. In the long run I am much more interested
in investigating the relation between picturing,
metaphor and knowledge than I am in producing a
theory in science. If a model becomes a fetish,
that is, identified with the process it
represents, the relation between content,
convention and context becomes opaque – closed. In
order for the relation between a model and its
object to be an act of artmaking, representation
must be transparent – remain open to continuous
interpretation or re-framing.

I don’t want to be ALL OVER the various dialogues here but i couldn’t resist. It occurs to me that the distinction between illustration and metaphor has more than one layer. It is not like one illustration simply illustrates whereas another is a metaphor, although that is often how it works. An illustration may be a metaphor, that is a symbol or it can be both, the way a tree can represent “oak” and also “permanence” or “conservativism”. My point here is I think Jack’s site is working this terrain of both illustration and metaphor.

If i may be so bold, risking being too simplistic, I see the symbolic aspects of the scientific project “embryogenesis” having to do, in a very particular and specialized way, with broad life metaphors”birth”, “growth”, and “change”. It is so unusual to use sceintific discourse in such a metaphoric way.

I have been reading all of the responses and I
think they are wonderful. I don’t know if I can
do them justice but I will sure try. I’m giving
you more than questions this time and so I should!
I want to talk more about the way thought is
experienced and I will return to the question of
illustration and metaphor. First a question:
Jack, I am not sure what you meant when you said
that for you, some elements of thought are of the
muscular-type. Did you mean something like
embodied thought? I understand and sympathize
with you comments reagrding the visual component,
however, and I’d like to throw some stuff out into
the air about that.

In a philosophy class I was in about six years
ago, the professor did an informal survey of our
class to find out who of us could think only in
words and those who could think in images as well
as words. About a third of the class claimed to
be able to think only with words. My professor
claimed that he could not call to mind pictures
that he had seen: in fact, he was hard pressed to
represent faces to himself. He wryly commented
that Derrida must be of this group! Now, I am
wary of such “groups”, but anyway, there appear to
be studies which support the claim that some
people just do not think using images.

I was quite surprised by all of this. I assumed
at the time that everyone thought using images: a
self-centred assumption for sure. But now I am
less convinced of my own ability to think using
images. I seem to rely so much on words these
days. And yet, while dreaming, pictures convey to
me deep insights about myself. A simple pictorial
symbol often conveys what might otherwise take
months of self-analysis.

Do you think the ability to think in images can be
exercized in much the same way that, with
practice, our writing improves? The answer may
not obviuosly be “yes” to those of us outside of
the visual art worlds. As you point out Jack, our
constructed hierarchies of thought, and their
implicit valuations cause us to ignore, suppress,
minimize visual thought.

Besides making us more human – creative; sensitive
to beauty, wonder, feeling and thought; open to
new ideas – the embryogenesis of breath, through
its intermelding of images and words enables us to
make fresh new connections. It is the kind of
work that might help those of us (whomever this
“us” might be) with the loss of imaging in
ourselves. It is a relief to me, forever inside a
text as I am.

Crossing disciplinary boundaries opens new
connections, but it is not only about discovering
new things. It is also about justification of
ideas: Jack’s work provides justification for
believing that embryonic lungs develop in a
certain way. Scientists do this also: many have
very creative and emotive relations to their work
and data (Barbara McClintock is a good example but
there are many unknown scientists hanging about
who would do just as well). Perhaps some
scientists who work in this way do not feel at
liberty to reveal their methods given the current
restictions on what is appropriate for scientists
to think about. It seems not to matter what our
occupations are: people who are drawn to art, the
art in life, the beauty in science, the science in
beauty are sprinkled everywhere. Yet it is not in
our culture to openly reveal and develop these
interdisciplinary connections. And so, Jack’s
work gives us much to reflect upon, and examine.

Now: about metaphor. I think all illustrations
are metaphors. This is not to say that this is
all that illustration is; just that one of the
things it is is metaphor. Illustrations, intended
metaphorically or not, tend to become so in the
mind of the viewer. This is what I meant when I
asked if the relation between illustration and
identity was one of identity. I should have just
come out and said that! So Jack, your
interpretation of “=” was correct, although I did
not mean logical identity which could never hold
between metaphor and illustration, but only
between metaphor and metaphor etc.

The definition of metaphor I am using here,
however, is so broad that it risks becoming
contentless. I think of metaphor as a way in
which we conceptualize. Rather than being a thing
on a page, metaphor is a process of sorts. It is
not necessarily based on similarity, or even on
difference. The best ones bring together two
conceptual schemes not formerly in contact: and
wordlessly, new understanding and/or new
associations are made. The metaphor is not in the
words used to convey it. It is in the open-ended
and indefinite concepts that arise from it.
Thoughts radiate out (the metaphor a stone dropped
from a height) and are the waves breaking on the
arctic lake. They are breathing: air rushes in as
further associations are made, and as it is pushed
out we refocus on the words or picture itself
trying to determine its meaning in the absence of
all the connections. We cannot and so we take
another breath.

Perhaps “metaphor” is the best term that has been
found for this thinking experience. Stolen from
literature and linguistics, it means here
something quite beyond its technical definition.
I say this so as not to offend anyone who is
working on metaphor proper.

I hope I have clarified the place from which I
asked these questions. I look forward to reading
more responses to this site.

Re-reading yesterday’s posting I realized Moira’s question “Is the relation between illustration and
metaphor one of identity?”
Jack, did you purposely replace identity with an = sign or is that a science-engendered habit?

Moira, are you using identity in a particular way, or for a particular reason, instead of asking, for example, is illustration the same as metaphor, or how is illustration like, or not like, metaphor?

Jack, your response, that you are “identifying visual metaphors, as a method for enacting embryological science – using picturing to do science” is interesting from a science point of view, a kind of lateral thinking used to “illustrate” phenomenon which cannot be easily observed or otherwise documented but it is also challenging from an artistic or aesthetic point of view which is where I was trying to get to – how the work itself not only illustrates embryological processes but as a broader metaphor.

The term identity is so loaded up in art jargon, I wonder about it but then it often raises or points to issues of the subject, the subjective and the objective.

Jack, can you say something about your, the artist’s, relationship to the subject here. I find myself uncertain whether the subject is the embryo’s lungs, embryology or science generally. All of the above?

There is something to be said here also about inter or multi-disciplinary work, that migrates across boundaries, carrying meanings,often critically.

Are you familiar with the medical usage of a technique which I think is called moulage? It involves wax casting and painting and is/was used particularly to reproduce skin diseases for study (by medical students). Is it still in use or has it been supplanted by new technology. eg. the web. I saw an excellent book about it at the U of T bookstore, medical section. It was outrageously expensive, even more expensive than an art book. Those doctors.

It’s exciting and strange to begin this
conversation. I’m beginning with some hesitation…
The site IS beautiful. Am I alone with it now?
I plan to return with some thoughts for a period of
a few days/weeks — in the hope of breathing my way
to a meaningful response to this site and your
exhibition.

No Patrick, you are not alone now. You claim a
public space in the discourse centering on the art
of representing human embryological development.
Alas, we are confined to words for the time being.
Your pictures of embryos woven into the domestic
spaces defined by the patterns of wall paper would
add a rich other dimension to the discussion on
this site. Will you articulate in words (perhaps
poetic) the relation you construct between embryos
walls and spaces?

Last week I wrote something here, in response to
the peice, and in response to Jack’s question
about my own history of constructing (speculating
on) a relationship between embryos and wallpaper.
Alas, the peice got lost… so now I add memory to
the matrix that I’m developing here. Can I
reconstruct a text that went away instead of going
‘out’ into the space we’re all trying to somehow
inhabit here?
1. On “The Yellow Wallpaper”:
American 19th century domestic reformer Charlotte
Perkins Gilman wrote a now quite famous story that
addresses my topic. In it the protagonist, a woman
confined to her room due to illness, is described
in her ‘descent into madness’ (or, as experiencing
stages of increasing neurosis aggravated, if not
caused, by the actions of a dominating
husband).The florid wallpaper surrounding her in
her upper room gradually comes to life; the woman
behind the wallpaper rattles the intertwining
vines. The walls are alive, breathing.
2. Embryos and Wallpaper
Here I want to invoke domestic space as a site
that is inscribed in ways that parallel the
inscriptions (social/psychoanalytical) of the
female body. I do this in order to speculate, as I
did in an exhibition entitled “Re-entering the
House of Flowers,” on the notion of ‘a small
room’: a floriated space of embryonic development.
Here, a viewer may peer at fetuses in varying
stages of development, through tiny floered frames
that resemble ‘modernist windows’ (in the context
of art), and also conjure the notion of ultrasound
imaging (in the context of scientific study).This
is the room that I, according to my biology (and
the present moment of ‘scientific history’),
cannot fully have access to. My experience remains
disembodied, no matter how much I attempt to
‘personalize technogenic appearance.’ (Barbara
Duden)

3. Glass Walls/Breathing House
A mere few hours after our first son, Thomas, was
born his breathing became laboured. This wa
disturbing to my partner and I, and surprising as
well. He had come into the world so seemingly
robust and fully developed.
Many tests and several hours later he was confined
to an incubator, a breathing house of glass that
would support his life for about a week. Gradually
the results of tests made it apparent that he had
experienced ‘wet lung’ — he had breathed in
amniotic fluid as he was being born — which was
not fatal but required ‘medical incarceration’
nonetheless.
I am interested in my son’s early history, and I
recall my experience of it as one of emotional
extremes within a kind of dream-like
temporality.But, as I grow more distant from it in
time, I’m also interested in it in the context of
some of the binary constructions that modernism
has been plagued and invigourated by:inside/
outside; glass walls in contrast to those dense
containers of the 19th century and before; science
versus art. I wonder if my son’s birth experience
was as if he’d moved from a 19th century-like room
(deep and red) into a modern, transparent chamber.
I wonder about my own ambivalent longings — that
the chamber remain deep and red, even as its walls
are made transparent and full of light.
(Jan. 11, ’98)

Dear Patrick, I want to think about your response
to “Embr. Br.” before attempting to further our
conversation. Yours is such beautiful and
poignantly personal writing. Your response sets in
motion waves of (fictitious?) “memories”: I spent
the first 6 weeks of my life in an incubator, so
my mother tells me, and I have often wondered if
my pre-memory experience – isolated beyond touch,
but fully accessible to the visual – is one of the
roots of my own life-long passion (pleasure/pain)
for making images and theories about embryological
development.

Your final image of a chamber, “deep and red, even
as its walls are made transparent and full of
light” reminds me of the “red” I felt that I found
in my 1987 work “Red and Not Red”. The truest red
seemed to be the red glow which emerged from the
assembled grid of all the various reddish hues in
this work. So perhaps it is possible to be both
places at once!

Great to hear from you Arlene. Starting from the
idea that pictures on the web, like all art in all
materials, are thoughts (not about thoughts)
colour seems to me to be among the most direct
mediums for thinking. Will you say something about
colour on the web – especially colour on this
site? Regards, Jack

I meant to call to mention the book review in last
weekend’s (the week before this last weekend) Globe
and Mail. I don’t even recall the name of the book
now, which was panned, but the point of the book
was to show how science and art/culture can be
reconciled. As I recall the reviewer said the book
failed to deal with the scientific belief that
everything can be measured. Scientific belief, I
wouldn’t have thought I would be able to put those
two words together in the same sentence.
Generally I find artwork that puts tech high on
its list of priorities to be missing something
else, the cultural part. I don’t find that for the
Embryogenesis work, which is more complicated,
certainly in terms of the presentation on the web,
which is afterall a most cross-disciplinary medium.
certainly.

What a weird review, knowing that this a book
review in a National paper! What I am wondering
about is can he measure love, the feeling and the
tangibleness of that feeling? By what standards
does scientific research does one measure love –
By today’s which sort of goes something called
“tough-love”, or by the wimpy measure that
hollywood has, or would the standards be that one
becomes a doctor who finds herself saying alot
of: “This is goind to hurt..” but its’ good for
you? I know that science and research is one of
those oxymoron type subjectsd to get into but I
must admit that the commentator puts a whole new
twist, eh?

Hi Ruby,
I was interested with your response and the idea
of love in relation to art and science. Love is
not one of angles I initially took towards this
site but now that you’ve mentioned it, I am
suprised that I neglected it when I was thinking
about breath and the developement of life. Maybe
it was my attempt to think scientifically that
blocked out this notion of love, a feeling that I
cannot measure or calculate in scientific terms.
Jeremy

From Kurt Goedel we have learned that nothing can
be self-referencial. The conundrum is a bit more
complicated but we can savely say that all
things, all beings, all thoughts, all concepts are
ENS AB ALIO (dependent entities). This is the
unmistakable reallity we live in. No scientific
argument has its justification in itself. No
artist can claim to create ‘out of nothing ‘. WE
feel that on every step on our way . This also
means that all things are interconnected.
Basically that is why I think that you are on the
right track. I hope to have time and opportunity to
go deeper into these matters. May be if Jim can
mannage to organize another conference at
Interaccess. Good luck, Juan

Ever since I saw the notes on the blackboard that
you had set up during your presentation at last
year’s Subtle Technology conference at
InterAccess, notes that you did not get to
discuss, I suspected that you turn to analytic
philosophy to find an anchor for your practices in
art and in science. I was so sorry your
presentation did not get so far as to explain your
intentions in presenting us with Kant’s analytical
terms for his “Critique of Pure Reason”. And now,
today, you start your response to our website
about the art and science of (embryological)
modelling with a reference to Goedel’s theorem and
its influence over much contemporary thought. Your
(and Goedel’s) conclusion that mathematics is not
a self-referential system (dispite what would seem
to be evidence to the contrary from the entire
tradition of analytic mathematical logic from
Frege to Russell), begs, I believe, a summary
statement of Goedel’s contention. What was it that
Goedel discovered that so turned the course of
contemporary mathematics? I think, Juan, that if
anyone can make this idea accessible to our web
audience it will be you. With much appreciation
for joining our conversation, Jack

It is difficult to visit this visually opulent site
with its intellectual provocations and its
saturated colours without thinking reflexively
about the process of visitation. In a sense,
computer technology replicates the patterns Jack
describes–whether alveolar chamber walls, Islamic
geometric tiling patterns, soap bubbles, or
honeycombs–because as respondents to the site, we
are simultaneously confined to the solitude of our
own computer terminals and also joined within the
honeycomb community of respondents, both divided
and linked by the walls of our subjective
partitions.
I was especially intrigued by the exchange
between Patrick and Jack because it brings up
questions about memory. Patrick talked about his
infant son being confined to an incubator and Jack
invoked a memory that is not quite a memory about
having spent his first weeks in an incubator. Both
of you explicitly consider memory–as a repository
(chamber) of experience that is always changing,
being affected by others, altering as we add life
experience to the mix. Of course, as psychoanalysis
reminds us, we never have unmediated access to
those memories, particularly to the primordial
ones–in utero, birth, first breath, life in the
glass chamber of the incubator. Still, they must
shape in some primitive way our orientation to
knowledge and they must do so in ways that are not
just epistemological but also burdened with
emotion. I think that looking at an image of an
embryo or fetus is heavily freighted with
affect–we tend to get these images in popular
culture and the media in places where they have an
affective dimension: illustration of the marvels of
science or life (or both), abortion debates,
pregnancy books. I don’t think it is possible
(certainly not for me as a woman/femminist/mother)
to look at these images in a way that’s shorn of
desire, nostalgia, wonder. I expect that there’s
always a sense of connection to our past (in utero)
and future (children). The richness of the color
seems to stand in some displaced way for that
emotional register (and Julia Kristeva’s theory of
the semiotic as the register of the pre-linguistic,
often evoked by color, is pertinent here). And I
wonder about my own response to the idea of fetal
isolation, for I shared my uterine comaprment with
a companion (a twin)!
In looking at the images on the site, I have an
eerie sense of invasion. Not only am I looking
(presumably) into the private chamber of a woman’s
body (or perhaps at what has been removed from
it–the fetus/embryo still connotes that
interiority), but I’m also looking at the inside of
that embryonic/fetal body, at the various
developmental stages of lung tissue. This radically
interior view seems as once a violation and a
marvel, a violation because in order to see
properly one does need in a sense to discard the
exterior body (of woman, of fetus). In order to see
patterns and the relationships among them, we need
to violate the context–isn’t this how scientific
vision is honed (by isolating the body part so as
to concentrate more fully on its attributes)? What
about artistic vision? By yoking the two, Jack, you
seem necessarily to raise ethical questions about
science, about the appropriateness (and
cost–literal and ethical) of cultivating
scientific vision.
This brings me to my final point–how
extraordinarily visual the site and the experience
of the site is. This seems like an obvious point,
except that the images (fetus, soap bubble, tile,
honeycomb) evoke the other senses as well,
especially touch. The sheer beauty of the website
(colour, layout, images, patterns) almost
compensates for the senses that aren’t there, but
not quite. And that made me think of the incubator
again, for if you saw the world in your first weeks
of life, Jack, through glass walls (and were
deprived, perhaps, of certain experiences of smell
and touch), are we replicating your state from the
other side, looking through the glass wall of our
computer screen deep into the early memory of an
infant breathing?

1. Counterpoint
Listening to Edward Said on “Ideas” the other
night (the radio was just audible above the noise
of traffic, my attention was focused on surviving
the 401), on some other plane of consciousness I
was picturing “… my state from the other side,
looking through the glass wall of our computer
screen deep into the early memory of an infant
breathing?” (your question about the visual
experience of this website). Your allusion –
through the glass wall of the computer screen –
disolved before my minds eye into the heavy
greenish sheets of glass I had been etching in my
studio – pictures of embryological development, my
own children as babies, my own (possibly) first
(primitive pre-conscious) views of the world from
inside the glass walls of an incubator (so my
mother tells me). Concurrent with my visual
reverie I think I heard Said say that the multiple
voices of postmodern culture could by imagined by
analogy to a fugue by Bach (a surpirising analogy,
it seems to me, for Said’s post-colonial
discourse) but, whether I am quoting Said
correctly or not, my visual thoughts were
instantly stratified into the layered
picture-voices of a fugue.
Counterpoint: two, three, as many as seven
individual coherent sustained voices picture
simultaneously. I experience the polyphonic syntax
, now consonant now dissonant, at one moment
transparent at another opaque. While the multiple
and indeterminate visual semantics (the pictures)
seem to be simultaneously private and public,
constructed and revealed.

In the (virtual/electronic) imaging of the
website, as in the layered (material) glass
pictures in progress for The Miners’ Canary
exhibition, I have been attending to the syntax –
the counterpoint – while you, Elizabeth, have been
most generously attending to the semantics.

2. “…we tend to get these images in popular
culture and the media in places where they have an
affective dimension: illustration of the marvels
of science or life (or both), abortion debates,
pregnancy books.”

I believe a very important picture-voice is
missing from my visual counterpoint – a visual
layer representing exactly those affectively
freighted images from popular culture that you
mention. Would you, “as a woman/femminist/mother”
identify the key picture (or pictures) that you
have in mind, from your own experience, so that I
could (with your permission) incorporate this
missing voice? I, too, am in search for THE (my)
source picture emblematic of Comming into Being
and Passing Away. But your source picture is not
likely to be the same as mine. Or could it be?

Jack and Sheila: If I have not told you that I
am so pleased and grateful for both your ways of
thinking that questions – or is it a state of
learning lifestyle. Having searched the whole of
this website a number of times I am struck by it
everytime of its warming/humane learning and
thinking. I like, the Biblical King David half
sing: “Marvel in awe how amazing and wonderfully
made, you have created me.” and the hymn going
throughmy mind of: “O Lord my God, when I in
awesome wonder; consider all the world thy hands
have made…” And how often I sadly think of the
times precious humans have been turned of by His
supposed priests/deciples how far we have looked
through “the vail” and how oft we deliberately
cover the truth, the life and the freedom His son
meant to bring.
Your questions of when and how did “the breath of
life” enter and how does it end and what can we
do to prolong the breath of life. I am reminded
of: “And God breathed on his creation of dust
and soil and he became a LIVING BEING.”, and also
of words within the same books: “He gave up the
ghost…” Again in the same set of Books in
Isaiah and again I believe in The Psalms: “I
knew you when I formed you in your mother’s
womb.” bein an Inuk, I too, like my anscestral
people believe that “abortion only when the life
of the mother is in danger.” Unlike the
feminists and proabortionist know that a fetus is
not part of the mother’s body otherwise we would
all be physically connected to our mothers. As
Attuat, one of our late elders once blatently
stated: “In many ways us women/mothers are just
bags and carriers of another human being.” Inuit
(most) believe that we have no more right to
interrupt/kill a pregnancy than we do in killing
another (born) human being. the truth is, we had
little to do with being formed, nor of where we
were born to so where do we get off snubbing
someone else’s life? the question is asked: did
you decide to be formed and born? If you have no
control of your own birth then where do you get
off?
being a sigle parent, I have to admit I had to
answer those very questions and not having
killed, and now 24 years later no one know the
joy, releif I feel of not having aborted someone
who has taught me to give my all. Also in
relexion against those whom I know have
aborted/ended an embroyo I have a fuller and reer
life than they do.
Just couple months back, I watched a little 7
year old fight for life after a heart-lung
operation, she fought for 36 hours, and watching
her dying for water/juice any liquid during those
hours was one of the hardest “good for you act” I
have ever done. Her fight seemed so ironic when
she started to fight fluid build-up around her
upper chest around her lungs. during those hours
as I prayed I have to admit I had your artworks
visible going through my mind – there were times
I was at a loss for words – liquid is so needed
but too much sure can make physical life very
painful, thoughts that some of those breathes
might be her last – and watching the oxygen air
bag, in-out, in-out, the longest a seconds or so
later of out, relief flowing through me. I must
admit those 3 weeks were the longest seconds and
minuites i have every gone through. For the sake
of continueing life/abortion opinion, I also knew
taht her life was in jeopardy during the first
month of her growth sends shivers and rejection
of those kinds of thoughts go through me – can
not imagine death of her – how much more richer
and and giving I have learned because their lives
were spared as they were just beginning to enjoy
life.

“…When I in awesome wonder…”. It has been
about 46 years since I began my first art/science
works as my medium to research the development of
life in the embryo. It is that overpowering
feeling of awesome wonder that propelled me as a
teenager and that moves me now to continue this
questioning research on the Embryogenesis of
Breath website. The art studio and laboratory
research disciplines for both analysis and
expression in the website are focused on Picturing
(representation, illustration, etc.) and Knowledge
(theories about development, growth, form,
structure). But Ethics (the moral dimensions of
biological research), religious beliefs and
abortion debates surround the pages of the site
like a halo of bright light and underlie the site
like a dark shadow.

Your story about the weight of responsibility
associated with your personal decision to become a
mother is inspiring. And your “good-for-you-act”,
watching, in terror, the oxygen air bag go in and
out, as you waited beside the child who had come
through heart and lung surgery add your light and
your darkness to the growing meaning of this
conversation about the awesome wonder of human
development. Thank you dear Ruby. Jack

Hello Jack, Jeremy and other participants. It is a
long while since I visited — and contributed —
to the site. I have a lot of responses to what I
see here now, but my most direct one is to remark
on how beautiful the site is…. did I
forget?(Mind you, I have a better monitor now…
Funny, my eyes are deteriorating but my monitor is
improving.)

Further, the layers of responses have the effect,
for me, of invoking a more complex spatial model
here. This, I suppose, is the ultimate
abstraction: thinking through a developing spatial
construction in virtual space.

I’m glad Jeremy invited me back in… and do I
intend to come back to the table/keyboard with
more to say on embriogenisis.

Again, to my way of thinking, if the question is
phrased, “How do emotion and desire affect the
representation of truth …?”, emotion and desire
are reduced to being passive affects of some
(possibly transcendent, probably revealed)
representation.

How would you word this question? Or, what
question would you ask in its place?

i’ve been thinking about jack’s site on and off,
you know, sort of noticing things, remind me of it
or vice versa. like this bit, from the latest
issue of the magazine Fast Company:
“Women are canaries in the coal mine of power.
They fall over dead whenever work gets stifling.
They groove whenever new models of business
behaviour are emerging: consensual management,
flextime, the belief that work should have
meaning. Women are early adapters of technology.
…

“For that reason, we won’t see great leaders until
we see great women leaders.”

Response to Rob: Written in the spirit of – let’s
torment Rob!
“Women are canaries in the coal mine of power.”
Sounds great. Should be written on the walls in
The Miners’ Canary exhibition. Consensual
management, flextime, etc., are definitely the
right changes to conditions of labour. But wait:
something is very wrong here. It seems to me that
any statement that starts with “Women are …”
(great leaders, canaries, etc.) is liable to the
same stereotyping, generalizing abuses of power
historically associated with statements such as
“Men are …” (great leaders, eagles, etc.).
But you sure have got me thinking about the
relationship between the title and the intention
of The Miners’ Canary exhibition.

“Although Hamlet is not the first character to
reveal his thoughts on stage or to utter a
soliloguy, his particular expression of meditative
self-consciousness is both original and universal.
It represents a truth about human experience that
could not be told before.”
– from Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck

In her book Murray is talking about how new media
can be expected to produce new narrative
structures in the same way books and film, as new
technologies, affected (effected?:) cultural
production. She tried (1997) to anticipate what
the new narrative might look like by examining
what we had so far at that time: avatars, MUDs,
games, simulations. It didn’t get her too far but
far enough to give me a sense of virtigo.

Its on my mind — the new media — as you know
Jack, facing yet again a shift in work strategy
(as if it were a strategy and not a reaction).

Notwithstanding Murray’s essentialism (the notion
that art always represents a truth about human
experience as opposed to behaviours in cultural
parentheses), isn’t there a struggle in
Embryogenesis to wrest some new truth out of the
interface between science and art? And doesn’t
that mirror, though in a slightly different medium
(the web being after all, involved, though not too
self-consciously) the struggle going on in new
media: looking for something in the technology,
frustrated by familiar narrative structures, yet
bending the rules and structures too, however
slightly…?

I find myself searching backwards, as we are
taught, to your root directory: ~fatemaps (access
forbidden): searching for what? arithmetic
formulae? as if, if I could only find the
equation, I could be certain then of the
truthfulness of the product and proceed
untroubled, without contradictions, breathing
easily at last.

Jack I attempted once again to contact you through
your own mail but unable to so thank God for this
site. I have indirect questions for Tom as well –
it’s the Storybone game that I am wondering
about. I just need to know what I had promised to
do. I also obtained an old (1995) Apple computer
for my mother as a hand-me-down. I do know the
question is what site Mom should access the
internet for her part in the future of Storybones,
– I’ve called my brother Silas for info on
location, but he has not responded. To maintain
the line (phone) is $25. per month plus
longdistance costs (telephone) but unable to find
out who and at what costs connection would be. I
guess that is enough on that project – meanwhile
how long is the life of embryogenesis? How was
the wedding and what is Alexis’ up to?. take care
and a great big “hello” to sheila. Also are the 2
of you still planning to go to Baker? If so when?